A forgotten Virgil Tibbs novel drops the famously restrained detective into an unlikely setting: a Southern California nudist camp at the height of America’s mid-century nudist boom. In this episode of the Planet Nude podcast, we revisit The Cool Cottontail as both pulp mystery and cultural time capsule, following Tibbs through sun-bleached pools, polite prejudices, and a world imagined by an author who knew organized nudism from the inside. The result is a relaxed but revealing listen about race, respectability, and the strange places nudism has quietly surfaced in American popular fiction. 🪐











